Cyrus Philbrick, workhttps://cyrusphilbrick.com
collected and new writingThu, 15 Feb 2018 01:28:26 +0000enhourly1http://wordpress.com/https://s2.wp.com/i/buttonw-com.pngCyrus Philbrick, workhttps://cyrusphilbrick.com
The Tutmarc Brothers: Keeping Hawaiian Music Alive and Well in Seattlehttps://cyrusphilbrick.com/2014/09/27/the-tutmarc-brothers-keeping-hawaiian-music-alive-and-well-in-seattle/
https://cyrusphilbrick.com/2014/09/27/the-tutmarc-brothers-keeping-hawaiian-music-alive-and-well-in-seattle/#respondSat, 27 Sep 2014 01:36:21 +0000http://cyrusphilbrick.com/?p=241I recently published an article about the history of Hawaiian music in Seattle in Northwest Prime Time, “the largest publication in the Puget Sound region celebrating an active and healthy lifestyle for people over 50.” I”m honored to contribute to a publication that serves the elderly, a demographic ignored far too often in American society. You can view September’s issue here. It also features a profile of the multi-talented and precocious Sherman Alexie, who read Grapes of Wrath when he was five years old. Alexie also speaks honestly about coping with aging and his father’s death.

The following is the original, un-edited text of my article, titled “The Tutmarc Brothers: Keeping Hawaiian Music Alive and Well in Seattle.”

*** *** ***

On a chilly Sunday evening, eighty and ninety-year-olds crowd the entertainment room of an assisted living community in Seattle. Walkers tangle with wheel chairs, slippers, and chair legs. Shaky hands adjust hearing aids.

“Oh,” one resident says loudly, pointing across the small room. “There’s George. I thought he was dead.”

Northaven residents have come to hear the Tutmarc Brothers, Greg and Paul, who play a blend of hymns and Hawaiian standards. The brothers – often accompanied by their sister, Jeryl, on ukulele and Jay Deffinbaugh on bass – play monthly shows for nursing homes and churches around Seattle.

“We play nursing homes because they’re the only places that will have us,” Greg joked.

The Tutmarcs are content playing to a captive audience and carrying on the family tradition of spiritual Hawaiian music. They come from a line of lap steel players and manufacturers. Their grandfather, Paul Tutmarc, made some of the world’s first electric guitars in his Seattle basement and produced the first-ever horizontal electric base. Their father, Bud Tutmarc, also manufactured his own brand of guitars and bases while recording dozens of Hawaiian albums all over the world.

“To have something to connect us to our dad, and then also his dad, is really important,” Greg said. “It’s emotional. In life there are really two distinct chapters, BD and AD – before your dad’s death and after your dad’s death. Nothing is the same afterwards.”

Greg decided to learn to play steel guitar about fifteen years ago, when he realized that his father’s passing would mean the end of the family’s knowledge of the instrument. “When my dad was getting old, he couldn’t play anymore,” Greg said. “So I decided that I’d better learn.”

In his eighties, Bud taught Greg how to play by talking Greg through it. “He left me with these golden treasures of advice that I figure out later,” Greg said. “I’ll be in the middle of a song and think, ‘Oh, wow, that’s what he meant.’ Like he told me to always practice songs at the same pace you want to perform them. There’s always a tendency to rush through a song that you know. But you can’t. To really know a song, to feel it – you know, its shape and how it moves – you need to take your time.”

The lap steel guitar, or the Hawaiian guitar, is played on a lap or table using a steel bar to slide up and down the strings. The ringing effect created, known as “continuous glissando” or “portamento,” moves as the curving spine of a variety of Hawaiian sounds. It can be sensual and suggestive, or it can be solemn – as in the hymns played by the Tutmarc Brothers.

This sound, in its muted acoustic form, rippled through the United States in the early 20th century. It entered via West coast port cities like San Francisco and Seattle. The 1909 Alaska Yukon Pacific Exposition in Seattle, which drew over three million visitors in three months, witnessed a performance by the Hawaiian native Joseph Kekuhu, often sited as the inventor of the steel guitar. At eleven years old, so the story goes, Kekuhu had the bright idea to experiment sliding different metal objects along his guitar strings. Seattle music historian Peter Blecha writes that Kekuhu, after his Hawaiian exhibition performance, was swamped with requests to give guitar lessons.

By 1916 Hawaiian music was arguably the most popular genre of music in the country. Tin Pan Alley songwriters produced a number of popular Hawaiian songs, many of them forms of hapa haole, which means “half Hawaiian,” with phony Hawaiian words for lyrics. Arthur Collins & Byron G Harlan’s song, “Oh How She Could Yacki Hacki Wicki Wachi Woo (That’s Love in Honolulu),” spent nine weeks at number one on the 1916 Billboard Chart.

Paul Tutmarc, grandfather of Greg and Doug, embraced three crazes that converged between the World Wars: Hawaiian music, steel guitar, and electrification. “My great grandfather was into whatever was hip,” said Shane Tutmarc, also a musician and currently living in Nashville. In the early 1930s, in the dregs of the Great Depression, Paul spent days teaching music and nights in his garage workshop trying to charge instruments with electricity. Though he lost the race to patent the electric guitar, Paul founded one of the earliest electric guitar companies in the United States, Audiovox.

In the middle of a February 1935 Seattle Post Intelligence newspaper, Tutmarc posed next to a swooning woman while displaying the first ever hand-held fretted electric bass. The headline ran: “Pity Him No More – New Bull Type Fiddle Devised.” Paul said he created the bass because he felt sorry for upright bass players who had to lug their instruments across town or travel alone in a separate car while the rest of the band traveled together.

In the 1930s, the Tutmarcs played as a family in taverns around Seattle. A nine-year old Bud played rhythm guitar. His sister, Jeanne, played ukulele and sang. His mother, Lorraine, sang and played guitar. “Sometimes we had to lie about our age to get in,” Bud Tutmarc said in an interview with Peter Blecha.

In November of 1935, Paul was invited to play at the Hollywood Temple on Northwest 69th street. Bud says that his father agreed to play only because of the prospect of getting more work and more students. Not knowing any gospel songs, Paul played Silent Night. Christmas was still two months away.

Bud described the deep impact made on him by his family’s first trip to church: “We were faced with an immediate necessity of changing our entire lives. It was not only a necessity, but also a desire. Our music was no longer to be used for the devil; we wanted to sing and play for the Lord.”

Shane Tutmarc suggests that his family’s conversion may have had something to do with the conversion of Sol Hoopii, widely considered one of greatest steel guitarists of all time. “My great-grandfather [Paul] became friends with Sol. And my grandfather [Bud] was good friends with him later in Sol’s life. They both really valued his friendship, and both kind of idolized him.”

“Imagine,” Greg said of the father’s relationship with Sol, whom Bud first met as a teenager. “It would be like walking home from school to find John Lennon hanging out in your kitchen. “Sol was that famous, at least in our family.” Known as the “Hollywood Hawaiian,” Hoopii gained international fame for his stirring guitar work in Hollywood films like 1932’s “Bird of Paradise” and 1937’s “Waikiki Wedding.”

For Bud, all music served as different forms of gospel. Bud formed a Christian Orchestra that featured a number of famous guest Christian musicians, among them: Sol Hoopii, Arnie Hartman, and Ralph Carmichael. Starting in 1951, they performed “Monday Musicales” at the Calvary Temple, which served as the new and more Christian name for the Hollywood Temple.

The church’s orchestra maintained the drawing power of any blockbuster film. Chuck Rice, an assisted living resident, remembers the performances fondly. Rice played trombone. “It was wonderful,” he said. “We would fill the place, four or five hundred people, fill the balconies. The sound …” He shakes his head. “The music was beautiful.”

Another resident, Lloyd Lorentzen, recalls those performances. “I’d sit as close as I could to Greg’s dad, Bud,” he said. “I couldn’t sit close enough. I thought the music was straight out of heaven.”

This is a common refrain from audiences of Hawaiian music. “It just sounds heavenly,” said another resident. “It’s so soothing and different from anything else you hear today.”

Bud Tutmarc intended many of his recordings, some of which the Tutmarc Brothers currently play, to sound that way. At the close of an article for the Pentacostal Evangel, Bud writes: “I am certain music will be used to the fullest extent in heaven. In fact, singing and playing instruments will be among the few activities carried over from this life into the life to come.” Bud’s most popular albums, like “Rainbows Over Paradise,” have a dreamlike or eternal quality to them.

Greg says that he once heard the song as a boy while waiting in line at Disney World outside a Hawaiian restaurant. “I turned to my dad and said, ‘Man, dad, what if you got a nickel for every time that song plays here.’ It played over and over.”

When the Tutmarc Brothers perform they are not-so-subtly preparing their audience for the next life. Of playing at nursing homes, Doug says: “Music is a valuable way to give the message of hope and encouragement that God loves them. We’re trying to encourage them in the right direction … I only hope someone can return the favor when we’re in a place like this.”

Their songs are mostly Christian ones, some of them descended from the nineteenth-century missionary movement in Hawaii. At that time, Christian songs largely served two purposes: to save souls and to oppress traditional forms of Hawaiian culture, like hula music, viewed as lascivious by prude western eyes.

When delivered to a room of geriatrics, the hymns have a gentler and more purely uplifting purpose than their original one. One smiling woman observes that the songs sound like lullabies. Another says they sound like a song for a funeral.

The songs carry extra weight delivered so close to the listeners’ days of reckoning. On one hymn, “What a Friend We Have in Jesus,” Doug sings in a deep and resonant voice: “Are we weak and heavy laden, cumbered with a load of care? / Precious Savior, still our refuge, take it to the Lord in prayer.”

Greg’s guitar – a “Serenader Bud-Electro” built by his father – hums along with the melody, pulling it gently at the edges. In the audience, heads sway. A few eyes moisten. I nod in and out of sleep – a very gentle sleep.

]]>https://cyrusphilbrick.com/2014/09/24/poem-of-the-month-instructions-for-riding-the-bus/feed/0cyphilbrickA film it’s right to seehttps://cyrusphilbrick.com/2013/12/03/231/
https://cyrusphilbrick.com/2013/12/03/231/#respondTue, 03 Dec 2013 01:35:01 +0000http://cyrusphilbrick.com/?p=231I don’t usually use this space to promote anything, or anything besides a pretty random and tired selection of past blogs, unpublished journalism, and poetry scribbles. Well, here goes:

I’m guessing you haven’t heard of The Right to Heal. The film, and the movement it stands behind, get a fraction of the publicity of other global health causes: AIDS, clean water, and women’s education, to name a few of the most worthy. Into this world of hurt comes a global health movement for access to essential surgery.

How essential can surgery really be, you might ask. When compared to the fundamentals of survival – food and water – surgery can seem a privilege of a developed society, the cream of a mature education and health care system. The word surgery conjures images of expensive medical equipment and PHDs.

If you think in these terms then The Right to Heal might blow your mind. Unlike a lot of meandering and punch-less documentaries out there, this one gets right to the point. It’s a powerful one: we should include essential surgery as part of any health plan for the developing world.

Essential surgeries are sort of like essential vitamins and minerals, except getting one of them can change a life for the better, forever. According to the International Collaboration for Essential Surgery (ICES), essential surgery means fifteen basic surgical interventions. These interventions are typically simple, cheap, and quick– low-tech fixes that can immediately save lives or make a disabled life able. Surgically removing cataracts, for example, brings sight to the blind.

The Right to Heal, which stemmed from Dr. Jaymie Ang Henry’s experiences in remote parts of the Philippines, chronicles a few individuals who suffer from one of these fifteen conditions. Although Henry’s film covers remote countries the world over – like Tanzania, Burundi, and Kenya – it doesn’t need to search far for subjects.

Many of the fifteen conditions are astonishingly common in the developing world. Club foot, which makes walking an absolute bitch, affects one in every one thousand people. Obstetric fistulas, which if you don’t know what they are you should take a deep breath and look it up, devastate hundreds of thousands of women each year. Though the global health community has made remarkable strides in tackling infectious diseases, the burden of surgical diseases in the developing world has been largely ignored. As a result, the film says, the burden of disease of surgery has recently overtaken that of infectious diseases. About 2 billion people around the world lack access to basic surgery.

The film suggests that an individual with any of the above fifteen conditions costs society somewhere between $40,000 and $200,000. Many of the conditions hamper individuals from birth, preventing them from ever working or leading productive lives while also requiring costly personal assistance. The cost to cure these conditions, on average, is about $400. Curing clubfoot or cataracts: $250.

The problem with solving such a lop-sided equation between societal cost and cure is that many developing countries have almost no surgeons to perform basic operations. Burundi, to take one example from the film, has about 15-20 surgeons for the nation’s 10 million people.

At a recent screening of the film at the University of Washington, Dr. Henry said that the challenge, as with so many global health challenges, is one of scale. The scaling up of surgical procedures requires systemic support from the global health community and a challenging mobilization of resources to remote areas.

The essential surgery movement (The Right to Heal, ICES, and 15×15) is currently developing a testable on-the-ground strategy of surgical care. But, as Henry says, the first step toward gaining support and resources is to spread awareness of the problem. Thus the purpose of this blog post: to add in some small way to the movement’s push.

As far as I can tell, few people outside of the medical community have seen the Right to Heal. I’d like to change this. Any ideas?

]]>https://cyrusphilbrick.com/2013/05/06/poem-of-the-month-energy-level/feed/0cyphilbrickThe History of Cyprus’ Most Torrid Soccer Rivalry in “The Blizzard”https://cyrusphilbrick.com/2013/04/24/209/
https://cyrusphilbrick.com/2013/04/24/209/#commentsWed, 24 Apr 2013 01:27:39 +0000http://cyrusphilbrick.com/?p=209Cyprus is getting some serious space in the news these days, probably for the first time since about 1974, when a Turkish invasion split the country in two.

I recently spent some time in the country, mostly due to the pull of implicit egoism. Also while there, I investigated the country’s most torrid soccer rivalry, the Nicosia derby between Omonoia and Apoel. My piece about the history of the rivalry was published in The Blizzard Football Quarterly (VIII) in March. I recommend it to anyone interested in soccer, Cyprus, coups, or overlooked history – interests that should account for pretty much everybody. The rivalry is a fascinating and deep-rooted one that stretches back to the British occupation of the island. I also hope the piece sheds some light on the the country’s current political state.

For those who aren’t familiar with The Blizzard, it is a quarterly magazine started by The Guardian’s Jonathan Wilson for folks who prefer their soccer stewed in some culturo-politico juices, or for those so consumed by soccer that they cannot process information of any other sort. The magazine’s content and style are wonderfully diverse. Issue VIII has some stellar pieces on: Mourinho’s cult of personality; Zlatan Ibrahimovic’s otherness; and the ups and downs of Nigeria’s national team. Oh, and the magazine offers an ingenious “pay-what-you-like” option for both print and digital forms.

Can you pick up some mouth-wash on the way home? No, not that crap. Freshicle Max. No. Fresh-ick-leMax! Yeah. It’s pricier, but worth it … Well, no more snoring, for one. More importantly, my breath will jumpstart your bones. No joke. Freshicle patented these nanoparticles called Crysta-salves. Patented shit. I’m not totally clear on how they work, but basically they erase friction from brain to tongue, body to body, mind to mind, etc. They’re inspired by the skin of some extinct penguin. Totally organic. Yup, so better … Yeah, I didn’t know penguins could do it better than us either. I know, they’re so much more than cute … Sure, there are other products specifically for that. But C-salves also help you say what you mean, or help me say what I mean, which will conveniently be what you want to hear, and what you want me to want you to hear, and well, you get what I mean … Do those other pills do that? None of those at the pharmacy, at least. Oh, and they also help you smell threats miles away, like approaching meteors or shifts in particulates from forest fires. So really the stuff provides a survival advantage. Remind me to pack some in our Bonk Out bag. Oh, and Max lets you run on magnetic waves, so we’d shave a little off our food bill too … Sweet. Thanks. Nope that’s all. Two point five will do, if the price is right, but two point seven, if you really want me to show you how much I can love you.

-Cyrus Philbrick

]]>https://cyrusphilbrick.com/2013/03/08/poem-of-the-month/feed/0cyphilbrickPoem of the Month: Darwin’s Podhttps://cyrusphilbrick.com/2013/02/01/poem-of-the-week/
https://cyrusphilbrick.com/2013/02/01/poem-of-the-week/#respondFri, 01 Feb 2013 20:49:52 +0000http://cyrusphilbrick.com/?p=176Digging through the crates, I resurrected this one from a college poetry class. I’m still reworking it. But the time seems right to share it considering recent news of i-phone thefts driving up crime numbers in New York city. The poem has two voices, one in regular font and one in italics (slightly hard to see).

]]>https://cyrusphilbrick.com/2013/01/26/poem-of-the-week-two-poems-about-art/feed/1cyphilbrickAdd it Up: Angst in the Music of Violent Femmes and Langhorne Slimhttps://cyrusphilbrick.com/2013/01/26/add-it-up-angst-in-the-music-of-violent-femmes-and-langhorne-slim/
https://cyrusphilbrick.com/2013/01/26/add-it-up-angst-in-the-music-of-violent-femmes-and-langhorne-slim/#respondSat, 26 Jan 2013 00:05:02 +0000http://cyrusphilbrick.com/?p=167* The following was published back in the summer of 2008 for “Crawdaddy!”. I’d post a link to the original, but I can’t find one anymore. The piece involves comparing angst in the music of Violent Femmes and Langhorne Slim, someone the music world hasn’t heard much from in a while. In digging up this piece, I’m tempted to make some changes, as I don’t think everything in it is as true as it once thought it was. I’m not changing anything though, because I wrote what I did for a reason, and at one point in my life I meant it.*

I’m probably out of touch, but I don’t think music today has the same roots in angst that it did in the eighties and nineties, when I grew up. Teenagers will always be angst-ridden bastards, but I’m not sure if they will ever have access to the same full-blown expression of those edgy feelings that flooded the entire musical landscape in the hey day of Trapper Keepers and fears about Yellow 5. Or, maybe everybody believes this about the decade in which they grew up, and I am only defending the music that defined my youth and my generation. Maybe angst necessarily moves with the times. In the end, who’s to say that “I Can’t Get No Satisfaction” ranked any lower on the angst-o-meter than Offspring’s “Self Esteem”? After all, angst is a slippery word. It is an unspecific feeling, or collection of feelings, that we generally use to describe any aspect of the torrid ups and downs experienced post-puberty: lust, depression, anger, and the residue of anguish that sweats through all these things.

All I know is that Violent Femmes are one of the angstiest (whatever this really means) bands I’ve ever heard. And, unlike some metal and hair bands, they didn’t rely on cheap methods of constructing this feeling, such as loud guitars and screeching. Angst coursed through the veins of their music. Brian Ritchie’s base, spasmodic but persistent, captures the adolescent paroxysms that come from pent up energy and frustration—a kid slamming buttons and jamming joysticks, desperately trying to reach the next level of Galaga. The band served as the soundtrack for a gaggle of frustrated teens that produced unfortunate casualties like vandalism, scabbed dicks, and maybe even a few slit wrists. They also produced a twisted Fuck-the-World sort of self-reliant joy, probably best experienced when tearing along towards nowhere in some beater wagon (or, second best, daddy’s convertible), flicking cigarettes out the window.

I tried, but I can’t think of a modern day equivalent to this band. This is an argument for another day, but I think a lot of modern rock music is either too dumb, or tries too hard to sound grown up and sensitive, to wrestle with angst in the same primal way Gordon Gano and Violent Femmes, along with some of their peers, did. One new artist, however, comes close.

Langhorne Slim, with his goofy hat and boyish charm, doesn’t share the latent menace that Violent Femmes showed in their first few albums. And although his music doesn’t fit our textbook definition of the word angst, it is so visceral and conflicted that it carries the aura of the word (which is all the word really describes anyway—some powerful aura of conflict). If angst can grow up and learn to live with itself, while still maintaining some of its integrity, then Langhorne gives this matured version a voice.

Like Violent Femmes, Langhorne Slim and his band The War Eagles make songs that rile emotions to a head. While Violent Femmes created a pressure cooker of adolescent anguish, using bent high notes describing sexual acts in their self-titled debut, Langhorne’s songs create a pressure cooker for love and all its swirling contradictions and yearnings. As a song title on his new album suggests, Langhorne writes songs about the “Tipping Point(s)” of relationships. His voice, passionate and ragged, roils along with the band’s up-tempo brand of folk that lets songs vibrate at this point of instability, like a wave permanently on the verge of breaking.

Angst, which is German for fear, works better to describe the sort of heavy anxieties about “hellfire and brimstone” that Gordon Gano channeled than it does to describe tensions involved in love. Angst is darker than love. And Langhorne’s charming love numbers admittedly seem tame compared to the harrowing struggles between heaven and hell that Gano expresses in Hallowed Ground, for which Gano apparently wrote most of the songs during study hall in high school. These struggles up the anti of an adolescent’s attempt to cope with lustful and destructive desires. They create tensions that are born out in Gano’s voice, which cracks between demonic and angelic in the same song.

Although Langhorne deals almost exclusively with love, he keeps this topic from becoming one-dimensional and lame by pouring so much into it. Watch him perform; not many musicians sweat on stage with as much conviction. Passion and pain drips from his voice, like Cat Stevens’s after some hormone injections. You can tell that love is Langhorne’s religion. And it’s not an easy faith for him to believe in. It doesn’t just lift him up or down. It makes him and it breaks him. He fights a war against it in almost every song. Love provides the only truth he can believe in, like he tells us in “Lord,” a heartbreaker with a melody that seems more determined by the feeling of the words in Langhorne’s mouth and gut than it does by any preconceived rhythm. Love also represents something he can never truly know, like he tells us in “Restless.” It sets him free; it shackles him in ways that he longs to break loose from. You get the feeling that the contradictions involved in this fight, which can be both timeless and trite, are what keep Langhorne going. He pushes through what has been sung and said before with the ignorance and recklessness of a teen, and in doing so he produces a gutsy brand of folk music. He doesn’t just sing about the highs the lows; he embraces them. He sucks up heartache like he sucks up a right hook to the gut. And somehow the pain feels good. He gets up, booze soaked and weary, brushes the dirt off his jeans, checks his bruises in the dash mirror and hits the road, knowing there is value in the loss and that he would do it all over again just for the rush.

All the freedom searching in both bands’ music makes for good road music. Both bands push you to want to break free from anything weighing you down and light out for the territory ahead. This urge also comes from the way the bands rely on relentless motion—folk music with some extra horsepower. It makes sense then that the bands’ drummers, the engines of their respective groups, share the same construction. Malachi DeLorenzo of the War Eagles is the son of the Violent Femmes’ Victor DeLorenzo, who left the band in the early nineties. Maybe this connection served as one of the main reasons that these two groups decided to tour together a few years ago.

The connections are more than musical. And I imagine that those teens that used to reach under their car seats and pull out sticky Violent Femmes tapes might now be thirty-somethings highlighting Langhorne Slim on sleek i-pods. Those that once fumed down the road after a breakup, wondering how they would ever get laid, are now those driving slightly over the speed limit, more heartbroken than angry, wondering if they will ever truly love. And also if they will ever get laid again.

By nature, bands make their most angst-filled music when younger. And although Violent Femmes became a more dynamic band in their later years, expanding their sound in more harmonious and humorous ways with albums like Why Do Birds Sing?, they also lost the anguished core of the sound that so precisely defined them. I wonder if Langhorne can continue to live in the genre of explosive love songs that he revels in. They have an intensity and edge to them that seem to depend on youthful exuberance. Like Gano, he might struggle to shed himself of the reputation he is building.

As a teen at heart, however, Langhorne probably doesn’t give a flying fuck about his reputation. Despite all his obvious passion and conflicts, he also has the throwback appeal of the sort of rock star who just doesn’t give a shit, who plays shows shirtless and grimy and just for the fun of it. And this is part of the reason why he is gathering such a devoted following. Ideally, this is how we want musicians to be: sexy but also raw, sensitive but also callous, torn but also carefree. In other words, fucking “angsty.” It’s a tough combination to get right, and an impossible one to maintain. But it will always be a powerful and likeable combination in music, angst’s most potent art form.

]]>https://cyrusphilbrick.com/2013/01/26/add-it-up-angst-in-the-music-of-violent-femmes-and-langhorne-slim/feed/0cyphilbrickWorld Cup 2010 Revisited: On South Africa’s Exithttps://cyrusphilbrick.com/2012/12/07/world-cup-2010-revisited-on-south-africas-exit/
https://cyrusphilbrick.com/2012/12/07/world-cup-2010-revisited-on-south-africas-exit/#respondFri, 07 Dec 2012 22:19:49 +0000http://cyrusphilbrick.com/?p=153*Some more digging in the crates … What follows will be a series of blog posts, some published and some not, slated for MLSSoccer.com. The posts chronicle my experience as a tourist during World Cup 2010 in South Africa. The timing of posting these is obviously terrible, as the world’s “Soccer Clock” is currently as far as possible from approaching World Cup relevance. But while I have the time and the means to revisit old writing, I thought I’d post them.

**Another unpublished blog post about South Africa’s exit from the World Cup.

On South Africa’s Exit

South Africa is out of the World Cup. Their exit marks the first time a host nation has failed to advance past the group stages of the tournament. How much will this loss affect the spirit surrounding the World Cup in this country?

The act of rooting for South Africa knit the nation and its visitors together. Watching South Africa’s games served as some of the most heart-rending and vibrant experiences of my time here. I’m not an experienced World-Cup-goer, but I doubt foreigners have ever embraced a team as fully as they embraced this home side. During my travels so far, I’ve seen nationalities from over the globe retire their national colors in favor bright South African yellow during Baffana Baffana games. It just felt right to root for them, as underdogs, as a colorful and diverse nation, as victims of long and still raw human rights abuses, as an uplifting story of democracy with much work to do.

During South Africa games the nation breathed together, which nations do all over the world when their team is playing. But this was a different sort of breath. It wasn’t poisoned with expectation and already-formed criticisms of personnel or coaching or player development. It was the type of breath you take after spending a floundering minute underwater. It was celebratory, thankful, and filled with hope.

I’ll be sad to see the force of this support go. I’m not sure if the city streets or the nation’s “Fan Zones” will buzz again with the energy exhibited during South Africa games, even for the tournament’s final games. In Durban, over 60,000 fans poured into South Beach to watch the big screen for South Africa’s first two games.

At these parties of both natives and visitors, the fans’ collective reactions revealed the massive hope and pride that exists in this country. I saw this not only in the moments of ecstasy for South Africa, like Tshabalalu’s opening goal, but also in moments of devastation. When Uruguay sunk South Africa 3-0, these 60,000 fans didn’t shout profanities or excuses. They didn’t react in all those negative ways that us Americans are used to when our teams lose. Instead, they collectively dropped their heads, in silence and shame, and shuffled off of the beach. One could say that these fans all shut up because they never expected South Africa to do much, that this result fulfilled a predictable end. But I think that such a widespread reaction of shame conversely showed how much pride the people of this nation have. Their pride is real and honest. And it is still intact. South Africans can hold their soccer-loving heads up knowing that their team competed in one of the most competitive groups of the World Cup. They drew Mexico and beat a world power in France.

It’s a shame that we won’t get to see such bright displays of Bafana Bafana spirit anymore. But I don’t think the home spirit will simply disappear with South Africa’s elimination. We won’t see flaming piles of vuvuzelas on the side of the road.

Instead, South Africans will continue to win us visitors over with their kindness and their hospitality. The people here – black, white, colored, and everything in between – tell you about their culture and their land with a passion and glint in their eye. Even if such hospitality has been drilled into them through media propaganda, and even if it’s plastering over the country’s mass depravity, it comes across as real. And it’s infectious.

Four years ago, Germany may have provided a perfect vessel for this tournament. While South Africa can’t compete with German infrastructure or design, it provides more of the magic drink that gets into your blood and makes you want to swim around in the country for a while. You want to talk to more of its people, see more of its land, eat more of its food, reach out more to the country as a whole. Soccer becomes secondary to awareness of the nation. And this, after all, is a big reason that a country hosts a World Cup. A country’s spirit relies on so much more than the results of its national team.

I don’t know what it would mean for the country to “win” after this World Cup. I don’t know how many tourist dollars or jobs the country needs to generate to pay for the billions it spent on hosting this tournament. But I know that the country is trying to offer a compelling dream of a better future. And I know the country deserves our support, now and after this tournament is over.